The Art of Authorship
Society of Cutaneous Oncology · Proposed Meeting · Fall 2026
The Art of Authorship
Who Gets on the Paper?
Guidelines, Culture, and the Reality of Scientific Publishing
A proposed 90-minute, multi-stakeholder Research Forum on how authorship decisions are actually made — and why real-world practice can diverge from established standards.
Meeting concept
Scientific authorship carries both credit and accountability. It affects promotion and reputation, and puts an author’s name — and responsibility — on the work.
The standards are clear. The decisions often are not. In practice, authorship may reflect many things beyond direct intellectual contribution: enrolling or caring for patients, providing access to data or specimens, trial or program leadership, mentorship, seniority, institutional hierarchy, reputation, or reciprocity from prior collaborations. In retrospective and other clinical research, even proximity to the patients or dataset can influence who is included. At the same time, substantial contributors may not always receive appropriate recognition.
If the rules are relatively clear, why does authorship in the real world so often look different?
This forum would focus on that gap between standards and practice: how authorship decisions are actually made, what pressures shape them, where legitimate ambiguity exists, and how different stakeholders see the same problem.
Format
Structured, moderator-led open forum
Duration
90 minutes
Perspectives
Academia · Editors · Industry · Publication professionals
Perspectives around the table
The same authorship decision can look very different to an investigator, editor, industry colleague, or publication professional. Many participants wear more than one of these hats — and that overlap is itself useful.
Academic investigators
How do clinical care, access to patients or data, study design, patient accrual, mentorship, seniority, institutional roles, consortium expectations, promotion incentives, reciprocity, and prior collaborations shape decisions to accept, decline, include, or exclude authors?
Industry & publication colleagues
How are external authors identified? When are authorship discussions initiated? How are contributions tracked? What happens when a proposed author does not meet criteria — or when an industry contributor does substantial work but is omitted?
Journal editors
What authorship problems actually reach editors? What raises concern? How useful are contribution statements? What can a journal reasonably police, and where does editorial responsibility end?
Writers, statisticians & methodologists
Which forms of intellectual, analytic, and writing contribution are routinely visible — and which may be undervalued, misunderstood, or rendered invisible by the traditional byline?
Our premise
These decisions are rarely made by one person or one group. Investigators, sponsors, editors, institutions, publication teams, statisticians, writers, mentors, and trainees all shape the process, often under different incentives. The point is to understand those pressures without losing sight of individual responsibility.
Why bring this into the room?
Authorship guidance is not new. What is less common is talking openly about how these decisions are actually made among the people who work together — investigators, editors, industry colleagues, writers, statisticians, trainees, and others.
Many of our assumptions about authorship are learned through experience: from mentors, collaborators, institutions, companies, and the culture around us. Bringing those experiences into the open may do more than raise awareness. It can give people a shared language — and perhaps a little more confidence — to ask difficult questions, decline authorship that does not fit, recognize contributors who are being overlooked, and start these conversations earlier.
As research becomes increasingly multicenter, multidisciplinary, and intertwined with industry and publication teams, these decisions are only becoming more complicated.
Goals of the forum
Unpack authorship decisions
Examine how authorship decisions are actually made — including the informal pressures, expectations, and assumptions that rarely appear in contribution statements.
Compare perspectives
Identify where investigators, editors, industry colleagues, and publication professionals agree — and where they see the same authorship problem differently.
Interrogate the gap
Ask why authorship practice diverges from the rules: ambiguity, incentives, hierarchy, habit — or something else.
Move toward better practice
Identify pragmatic ways to better align contribution, credit, transparency, and accountability across modern scientific collaborations.
Testing the premise
The survey, cases, and conjectures would not function as separate parts of the meeting. They would work together as a repeated discussion structure.
A short anonymous survey would go to all stakeholder groups before the meeting, using a common core with role-specific branching. Case-specific results would be held back and revealed during the corresponding discussion rather than presented all at once.
The question for the forum is why: ambiguity, incentives, hierarchy, habit, different ideas about contribution, or something else.
Discussion module 1 Why are we on the paper?
Case · The invited expert
A recognized disease expert receives a nearly completed abstract or manuscript from a collaborative group or sponsor and is invited to review it and join the author list. The expert did not participate in study design, conduct, analysis, or the initial interpretation of results.
Conjecture: Authorship can be driven as much by legitimacy, professional incentive, and social norms as by scientific contribution.
Publication groups may seek recognized investigators whose names lend credibility to the work, while investigators may be more willing to accept authorship when it is professionally advantageous and when respected peers appear to be doing the same.
Survey signal: Have you ever been invited to join a paper when you felt your contribution might not justify authorship? Have you accepted because authorship was professionally valuable, because respected colleagues were already on the paper, or because the invitation felt like part of the normal publication process?
- Author, not author, or depends?
- Why was this person invited — scientific contribution, expertise, credibility, relationships, or some combination?
- Why might the investigator say yes?
- Does seeing respected colleagues on the author list make the invitation feel more legitimate?
- At what point does a recurring practice become a norm even when it sits uneasily with formal authorship criteria?
- Who has an incentive to interrupt that cycle?
Discussion module 2 What counts as contribution?
Case · The clinically involved investigator
An investigator cared for patients included in a retrospective or prospective study, helped identify or enroll participants, and provided access to data or specimens, but had limited involvement in study design, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript development.
Conjecture: Clinical contribution and intellectual contribution are not the same thing — but in collaborative research, the boundary between them can be genuinely difficult to draw.
An investigator may be essential to making the research possible — identifying and caring for patients, enrolling participants, providing data or specimens — without having shaped the study question, analysis, interpretation, or manuscript. The harder question is whether being essential to the research is the same as qualifying for authorship.
Survey signal: Which contributions do you believe should count toward authorship: patient care, patient identification or enrollment, providing access to data or specimens, site leadership, data acquisition, interpretation, manuscript development, or some combination?
- Which of these contributions are sufficient for authorship, and which should be recognized another way?
- Does being essential to the creation of the dataset make someone an author?
- Should a clinically important contributor be offered the opportunity to make the additional contributions needed for authorship?
- Does the answer change for a clinical trial, retrospective study, registry, or translational project?
- Is there a meaningful distinction between contributing to the research and contributing to the paper?
Discussion module 3 Who really led the work?
Case · The buried lead contributor
A researcher at a contract research organization does much of the day-to-day intellectual work on a study: helps shape the analysis, works through the data, develops figures and tables, drafts substantial portions of the manuscript, and coordinates revisions. An academic investigator provides important disease expertise and interpretation but does not lead the analysis or writing. The academic investigator is listed first; the CRO researcher appears further down the author list.
Conjecture: Authorship order does not always reflect who actually led the work; status, affiliation, and expectations about who should “front” a publication can shape the byline.
In industry-sponsored and contracted research, the people doing much of the analytic, organizational, and writing work may be less visible on the byline, while a recognizable academic investigator is positioned more prominently because that is how the publication is expected to look.
Survey signal: Have you seen first authorship or author order fail to reflect who actually led the work? Would the same contribution be credited differently if it came from an academic investigator rather than a CRO researcher, industry scientist, statistician, or writer?
- Who actually led this work?
- What should first authorship represent?
- Would the author order look the same if the lead contributor worked at an academic institution rather than a CRO?
- How much should affiliation, status, or perceived credibility influence author order?
- Is it acceptable for the academic investigator to be first author if they provide important clinical interpretation and take public responsibility for the paper?
- At what point does the byline become misleading even if everyone listed legitimately qualifies for authorship?
- Does contributorship transparency solve the problem if most professional credit still follows author order?
Discussion module 4 Where is the gray zone?
Case · The Delphi survey
A Delphi study asks a group of experts to participate in multiple survey rounds and help establish consensus recommendations. A smaller investigator group designed the study, developed the survey, analyzed and interpreted the results, and drafted the manuscript.
Conjecture: Not every difficult authorship decision represents misconduct, and transparency alone may not resolve genuine ambiguity.
Survey signal: Does participation in a Delphi process itself warrant authorship? Should every participant be an author, or only those who also contribute to design, interpretation, and manuscript development?
- Does the answer change if participants substantially shape the questions or recommendations across rounds?
- How should meaningful participation that falls short of authorship be recognized?
- Would a detailed contributorship statement settle the question, or simply make the disagreement more visible?
To keep the discussion moving, one or two participants could be told in advance that they may be asked to react first to a particular case. They would not give presentations; their role would simply be to help open the discussion before it moves to the broader group.
Proposed 90-minute agenda
Act I · approximately 15 minutes Set the Table
0–5 min Opening and premise
Authorship as credit and accountability. If the standards are relatively clear, why does practice so often look different?
5–10 min The framework in one slide
ICMJE, COPE, contributorship, and the distinction between ghost authorship and guest/gift/honorary authorship. Enough shared vocabulary to participate — no ethics lecture.
10–15 min A first look at the survey
Two or three high-level findings about authorship experience and when authorship decisions are made. Case-specific results are held back for Act II.
Act II · approximately 50 minutes Test It in Practice
15–27 min Module 1 · Why are we on the paper?
The invited expert. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
27–39 min Module 2 · What counts as contribution?
The clinically involved investigator. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
39–51 min Module 3 · Who really led the work?
The buried lead contributor. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
51–65 min Module 4 · Where is the gray zone?
The Delphi survey. Case → live vote → related survey result → discussion.
Act III · approximately 25 minutes What Survives?
65–77 min Conjectures and refutations
Return to the working conjectures after hearing the cases and the room. Which survive? Which need to be revised? Which were wrong?
77–86 min What should change?
Prospective authorship discussions, contribution tracking, recognition of important non-author contributions, late invitations, declining authorship, and the responsibilities of lead authors, journals, sponsors, and institutions.
86–90 min Closing question
What is one thing we should do differently after this conversation?
Additional cases we may draw from
The meeting will probably only have time for four core cases. These additional scenarios could be substituted based on survey findings or held in reserve if the discussion moves quickly.
Expand a case to see the scenario and discussion prompts.
Reserve case The senior leader
A department chair, laboratory leader, or senior mentor provided infrastructure, funding, mentorship, or general oversight but did not participate directly in the specific project.
- Where does legitimate supervision end and honorary authorship begin?
- How much do hierarchy and fear of professional friction shape the decision?
Reserve case The statistician
A statistician performs the analysis, challenges the prespecified approach, proposes additional analyses, and materially changes the interpretation of the work.
- Is the contribution technical, intellectual, or both?
- How often are analytic contributions undervalued because they occur outside the traditional clinical hierarchy?
Reserve case The medical writer
A professional medical writer develops a substantial first draft under direction of the scientific team and iteratively helps organize the argument.
- When is writing assistance appropriately acknowledged, and when might the contribution cross into authorship?
- Does transparent acknowledgment solve the concern?
Building on prior work
There is already substantial work on authorship standards and on the difficult cases that arise in practice. The value for SoCO is to bring that work into our own community and ask what these problems look like today.
ICMJE authorship criteria. Authorship is framed around substantive contribution, participation in the manuscript, final approval, and accountability. ICMJE: Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors.
Medical Publishing Insights and Practices (MPIP) Initiative. A 2014 survey of 498 investigators, editors, publication professionals, and medical writers used seven gray-zone scenarios to examine how stakeholders make authorship decisions. BMC Medicine 2014;12:197.
COPE authorship guidance. COPE provides practical guidance on authorship disputes and potential ghost, guest, or gift authorship. COPE Discussion Document: Authorship.
CRediT contributorship taxonomy. CRediT defines 14 contributor roles to make individual contributions more transparent, while remaining distinct from authorship qualification. Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).
Moderator question bank
These are prompts to draw from if a discussion needs a push, not a script for the meeting.
Expand a perspective to see possible moderator prompts.
Perspective Investigators
- When was the last time you were explicitly told, before a project began, what would qualify someone for authorship?
- Have we normalized authorship as a reward for participation rather than a statement of contribution and accountability?
- How difficult is it in practice to decline authorship from a senior colleague, collaborator, sponsor, or consortium?
- Do early-career investigators experience these pressures differently from established investigators?
- What kinds of contribution are systematically overvalued or undervalued in academic medicine?
Perspective Industry & publication colleagues
- When in the life of a trial is the publication author group typically assembled?
- What practical criteria are used to identify external authors beyond the formal authorship standard?
- How are contributions prospectively tracked, and who has authority to challenge a proposed author?
- What happens when an invited investigator has not yet made a sufficient contribution?
- Are there circumstances in which substantive industry contributions are intentionally made less visible because of perceived optics?
- Which academic assumptions about industry publication practice are simply wrong?
Perspective Editors
- How often do you suspect that a byline does not accurately reflect the work behind the paper?
- What patterns raise concern for guest, gift, or ghost authorship?
- Do contributorship statements meaningfully help, or can they become a retrospective rationalization of an already-decided author list?
- When should an editor challenge an author list?
- What is realistically within the journal's responsibility, and what belongs to institutions and author groups?
- Are current authorship criteria fit for large, highly collaborative modern science?
Perspective Everyone
- Is authorship primarily a mechanism of credit, accountability, or both?
- If a person can describe what they contributed but cannot defend the paper's conclusions, should they be an author?
- If everyone technically satisfies the criteria only after being invited to review a finished manuscript, have the criteria actually done their job?
- What should happen to legitimate contributors whose work is important but insufficient for authorship?
- Should declining inappropriate authorship be recognized as part of responsible scientific conduct?
- What would you change about the culture rather than the guideline?
Potential scholarly output
The forum could also serve as the foundation for a multi-stakeholder perspective on authorship in contemporary oncology. The aim would not be to publish another generic summary of existing criteria. Rather, the perspective could synthesize:
- the existing authorship framework and prior scholarship;
- contemporary experiences captured through the SoCO survey;
- points of agreement and disagreement exposed during the Research Forum;
- the pressures unique to modern academic–industry and multicenter collaborative research; and
- practical principles for aligning contribution, credit, transparency, and accountability.
The paper should probably follow the same principle it argues for: authorship based on meaningful contribution across the groups represented in the forum.
The question is less who is getting authorship “right” or “wrong” than why these decisions vary so much in practice — and whether we can do better.